Élan Vital
Élan Vital
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埃兰·维塔尔
DOI：
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发表时间：
2012
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通讯作者：
Benson M. George
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作者：
Benson M. George
我们是从哪里来的？我们要去哪里？这些问题就像肩胛骨之间的痒，近得足以挠到，但无论你伸展多远都无法触及。虽然我们不知道我们渴望的深刻意义上的答案，但我们确实知道最基本的意义。除了试管婴儿，我们都有自己的起源于一个特定的性行为，我们都走向污垢。美国作家菲利普·罗斯（Philip Roth）最经常也最令人信服地将性与死亡联系在一起，他在小说《垂死的动物》（The Dying Animal）中提醒我们，性“基于你的肉体，出生的肉体和死亡的肉体”。结果如何？“只有当你做爱时，”他说，“你在生活中不喜欢的一切，以及你在生活中被击败的一切，如果是暂时的，纯粹是报复。只有这样，你才是最干净的活着，最干净的自己。”他赠款性的力量是有限的，并建议我们永远不要忘记死亡。但对罗斯来说，性远非“只是摩擦和肤浅的乐趣”，而是“对死亡的报复”。性是死亡的中指。“告诉我，”他坚持说，“什么力量更强大？”像往常一样，罗斯很有说服力。但最让我感兴趣的是我们不屈不挠的动力的来源，不仅仅是为了性，而是为了各种创造性的行为。因为当我们说，比如说，我们在这里把一个关于性和死亡的问题放在一起，我们也可以说我们在把一个关于生和死的问题放在一起。这种驱动力的来源是什么？对我来说，最有说服力的解释是哲学家亨利·柏格森（Henri Bergson）称之为“活力”的东西。粗略地说，柏格森的优雅理论是这样的：从物质诞生之初，就有一种生命力--一种生命冲动--存在于所有生物体中，这种生命力是进化的原因，它以永无止境的方式激励我们前进。柏格森在《创造性进化》一书中写道：“最初出现的有生命的形式”，“拥有巨大的内在推动力，使它们甚至从编辑那里提升到最高境界
Where did we come from? Where are we going? These questions are like an itch between the shoulder blades, near enough to scratch at yet unreachable no matter how far you stretch. While we don’t know the answers in the profound sense we yearn for, we do know them in the most basic sense. Apart from test-tube babies, we all have our origins in a particular sex act, and we’re all headed for the dirt. Philip Roth, the American writer who brings sex and death together most often and most credibly, reminds us in his novel The Dying Animal that sex is “based in your physical being, in the flesh that is born and the flesh that dies.” What is the result? “Only when you fuck,” he says, “is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself.” He grants that the power of sex is limited and counsels us never to forget death. But far from being “just friction and shallow fun,” sex, for Roth, is “the revenge on death.” Sex is the middle finger to death. “Tell me,” he insists, “what power is greater?” As usual, Roth is pretty convincing. But what interests me most is the provenance of our indomitable drive, not just for sex but for all manner of creative acts. Because when we say, for instance, that we’re putting together here an issue about sex and death, we might as well say we’re putting together an issue about life and death. What is the source of that drive? The explanation with the most staying power for me is that thing the philosopher Henri Bergson called “élan vital.” Put crudely, Bergson’s elegant theory goes like this: from the very beginning of matter, there’s been a vital force—a life impulse—immanent in all organisms, and this élan vital, which is responsible for evolution, spurs us forward in a never-ending fashion. “The animate forms that first appeared,” Bergson writes in Creative Evolution, were “possessed of the tremendous internal push that was to raise them even to the highest from the editor